I Am That Mother

When I was nineteen I lived in a townhouse with my best friend.   We were still in college, but we were excited to be living on our own.   The community of townhouses wasn't in a college area; it was all sorts of ages and families intermixed.

My next-door-neighbor became one of my best friends for many years and I have fond memories of her three children.  There was the tall, strange woman down the row that had a construction business with a very deep voice and overall stature of a man.   She was the nicest person you'd ever meet, but some people I heard had referred to her as, "Thang" because they didn't know what to make of her.   I heard from someone years later that she had had gender reassignment surgery.  I don't know if that was true, but I always liked her as a person, regardless.

There was a family that had two small children that played outside all the time.   They mostly played in a diaper or underwear.   Sometimes they'd run around carrying the cordless phone, leaving it in various places where the parents wouldn't be able to easily find it.    I remember at that time my roommate and I said, "when we have kids, we won't let them run around in a diaper."

But as it would turn out, I'm that parent in our neighborhood that lets her kids run around in underpants, a diaper or even nothing.  Today I was power-washing the deck and my children were playing in the back yard.   They decided to go under the deck to get, "rained on" and then decided being wet wasn't all that fun, so they took all their clothes off, leaving them under the deck to get filthy with the dirty water from above.

I noticed they were out in the yard yelling and screaming happily so I sprayed the water up in the air to land in their general direction.   More screams.   I aimed the water at the slide and they liked that even better.   For the next half-hour there was nudity in the back yard while I made progress on the deck.

When I got done, I brought them sandwiches and underpants to the play structure.   I knew our neighbors children were going to come out soon and I felt a modicum of modesty might be in order (not that their mother would mind).  

So yes, I'm the nudist or the lazy or even the crazy mom in the neighborhood now.   But I'm totally cool with that.

The Big Boy Update:  Loud Laughter.   In the last week my son has started to laugh out loud and even guffaw at things on the television.   He pitched a fit tonight because he wanted Mickey Mouse before bedtime and we told him he was watching Winnie the Pooh so he'd better get over it.   Two minutes later and there is crazy, happy laughter coming from him as he looked raptly at the television.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   "Is Cheese a nickname?"   We don't even realize we call my daughter "cheese" still until someone points it out.   Uncle Jonathan and I were picking the children up at school on Thursday and I asked him, "which one do you want?"   He said, "I'll take Cheese."   Her teacher overheard and asked me, "Is Cheese a nickname?"  I told her, "When her brother was little he couldn't say 'Reese', so he called her 'Cheese'".

Fitness Update:  I went to the gym this morning after cantilevering myself out of bed, avoiding a position that caused me a lot of distress in my lower, right back.   I went into the gym, warmed up on the elliptical for ten minutes and then went one block over in the car to the Chiropractor's office to be the first patient when they opened up at 6:00AM.   I was back not fifteen minutes later and was able to make the last thirty minutes of the workout.   It was, however, a fairly feeble workout as I needed to have a lot of substitution exercises.   At least I made it.